What potential pitfalls should be considered when counting specific values within a string in PHP?

When counting specific values within a string in PHP, potential pitfalls to consider include case sensitivity, special characters, and the possibility of the value appearing multiple times within the string. To avoid these issues, it is recommended to normalize the string and perform a case-insensitive search to accurately count the occurrences of the specific value.

$string = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
$searchValue = "the";

// Normalize the string and perform a case-insensitive search
$count = substr_count(strtolower($string), strtolower($searchValue));

echo "The value '$searchValue' appears $count times in the string.";